Projects

Spider Star

The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon... Read More.

Praise for Star Dragon

"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
-- David Brin

"Mike Brotherton, himself a trained astrophysicist, combines the technical acuity and ingenuity of Robert Forward with the ironic, postmodern stance and style of M. John Harrison. In this, his debut novel, those twin talents unite to produce a work that is involving on any number of levels. It's just about all you could ask for in a hardcore SF adventure."
-- Paul di Fillippo, SCI-FI.COM

OK, a NSFW comedy video based on Star Trek: I’m a Big Chocolate Slut. Again, bad words, so don’t watch at work unless you work someplace super cool.

Michio Kaku talks about evolution and gets quite a lot of it totally wrong. PZ Meyers appropriately rips him a new one for it. I’m personally not a big fan of Kaku, going back to the days when he lied about the dangers of the Cassini mission for his own political ends. He also seems weirdly overly enthusiastic about some things to point where I don’t trust what he’s saying sometimes. For example, he’s a string theorist and shouldn’t be drinking his own kool aid about string theory.

The trouble with Bright Girls. Some good stuff in here, but perhaps some confusing mixing it up with gender and generalizations. I think the thing to take away, bright or not, female or not, is that it is useful not to give up and seeing intelligence and ability as innate can be a stumbling block to learning.

Finally, let’s finish with a few links to articles about the Kepler Mission to find exoplanets. One. Two. Three. The last one is a super cool video showing the Kepler results so far with graphics and music.

Some great links there. I really liked the science fiction history chart.

I want to point out that it is probably important for us to consider the future consequences of choices we make now. You probably agree. And I’ll agree with you that we don’t know what the future will bring (the degree of uncertainty increases as we consider more complex systems such as human societies, economies, etc. and try to forecast out decades or centuries or millennia ahead). And yet, when we are looking for insights into what is more probable or less probable, I think I’d put more trust in the ideas of biologists, psychologist, sociologists, and historical economists than I would in persons without such disciplinary training. Yes, they are talking outside their area of expertise, because aside from time travelers from the future or prophets with extra-sensory perception about future events (and many scientists doubt the plausibility of either of these types of experts even being possible) there are no people with expertise about the long-term future trends for humanity. So of course we’re all grasping through the mist when we talk about the future of the species.

In that link you gave for a biologist getting it wrong, there is an interview with biologist Christian de Duve pointing out that evolution gives humans a tendency to restrict their concerns to a sort of time frame in which they are only like to care about things that will happen in a span of years or perhaps decades, but human survival as a species may require concern for longer time-frames. Also, he points out a certain sort of social myopia in which humans tend to form ethnocentric in-groups and become biased against or prejudiced toward out-groups. I think he’s right that these two problems of human nature are likely to be our undoing, if indeed we are undone before we’ve evolved into a better species.

And his emphasis on giving women more power because they are less aggressive and play a more significant role in early education is certainly one biologists have made for a long time. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, for example, advocated paying women a living stipend so they could be more choosy about who they reproduced with, and could choose better fathers without the pressing economic need to find any able-bodied brute to support them.